In this article, you’ll learn some of the best email marketing strategies. You’ll be equipped with the information you need to know to create an email marketing plan to drive sales for your business.

Email marketing is one of the most lucrative things you could spend your time on as a business owner. According to Campaign Monitor, email marketing is still the most effective form of marketing, with a 3800% ROI of $38 for every $1 spent. For more information check out this eCommerce email marketing infographic.

The problem is, many marketers focus on the wrong email marketing strategies. They focus on things like changing button colors to boost click through rates, optimizing the color scheme in their email, or changing things like their font size.

It’s not bad to want to optimize your email marketing campaigns. However, most people completely ignore much more important email marketing strategies that have a bigger impact on sales.

By following the best email marketing strategies, you could double or even triple the size of your business relatively quickly.

Why you need to have an email marketing plan:

For those with the right email marketing strategies, the ROI is insanely high. There are a few reasons for this:

Email is the only platform you actually own

It’s important to have an email marketing plan as email is the only platform that isn’t “rented.” You could have a million Twitter followers, but what if Twitter goes out of business? You could be getting hundreds of thousands of likes on Facebook, but what if your Facebook page gets shut down?

If you’re building your business on a platform that you don’t own, then you’re giving someone else control over the most important part of your business — your audience.

Even if your email host goes out of business, bans you, or something unexpected happens, you can still export the contact information of your entire email list whenever you want.

Email is transactional

Email is the way we all handle business and personal transactions. We’ve been trained to reply to emails when asked, forward them, and buy when necessary. Because of this, email is the cheapest way to drive sales — you don’t have to struggle to change people’s behavior or “make” them pay attention like you would through paid advertising.

And those things do matter! But the most important thing that most people completely forget about is understanding what their audience wants, and communicating it to them in a way that resonates on an emotional level.

Today, I’ll give you a few specific email marketing strategies you could use to skyrocket sales for your business.

It could even be as simple as sharing the story behind why you’re selling your product in the first place. How does it make you feel to use what you’re selling? What motivates you to get other people to use it?

Steli Efti from Close.io (a SaaS product to help sales people close more deals) does this really well in the email below. Notice how he infuses the “why” behind what he’s doing into this email.

Creating emotion behind your product is one of the best ways to get more prospects to buy.

Best Email Marketing Strategies – Identify the different “buckets” of customers

As eCommerce marketers, many of us send the same, generic email to our entire list over and over again. We email them about discounts, new products, special offers and more.

That’s all great. In fact, we should be emailing our audience when we have offers that might be of interest to them.

But we tend to ignore the fact that everyone on our list is different. They’re all in different stages of the “buyer’s journey.”

Some may already be customers. Others may have considered buying but are still on the fence. Some may just not be interested at all. Others may be more interested in one product than another.

Benefits of Email Segmentation

One of the best email marketing strategies is to segment your subscribers. By segmenting your list based on behavior, you can send targeted messages for each segment. Thus, increase the likelihood that they will buy. If you’re sending the same email to everyone, you’re inevitably going to leave some money on the table.

For example, you could send a specific email campaign to those who have bought from you before to try to get them to buy again. If you’re selling clothes, maybe you could remarket to older buyers to help them “complete their outfit.”

If you’re selling products that wear out over a certain period of time (i.e. shoes, cologne, deoderant, etc) , you could remarket to older buyers at end of the average length of time the product lasts.

You can do this quite easily through most email list providers — for example, using Mailchimp, you can set up an email campaign to re-engage customers who haven’t purchased within a specific time frame.

MailChimp also gives you options to run campaigns to reward your most loyal customers, request reviews from buyers, customers who buy a specific category of product, and more.

According to MailChimp, segmented campaigns have 14.45% higher open rates, 8.68% lower unsubscribes, and 63.71% higher click through rate than non-segmented campaigns. Thus, making it one of the best email marketing strategies.

By tailoring your emails to your market based on their specific behavior, you can skyrocket your sales because you’ll be helping your customers in their specific stage of the “buyer’s journey.”

Best Email Marketing Strategies – Engage with your audience

The keys to boosting sales is understanding what your audience really wants — from an emotional point of view. What makes them buy or not buy? Why were they motivated to sign up for your list?

The answers to these questions are worth their weight in gold.

And the best part is, it’s extremely easy to get it — all you have to do is ask your audience!

Check out this email from John McIntyre, an eCommerce email marketer:

Based on my behavior on his site, John noticed that I didn’t join his mastermind group.

Instead of just sitting back and guessing why I didn’t join, he set up a campaign to automatically send an email asking why I didn’t join, and asked me to hit “reply” and let him know.

You can set up a simple autoresponder similar to this for when people first sign up to your list, asking them why they signed up. In addition, you can set up another asking customers what motivated them to buy. And you can set up another asking non-buyers why they didn’t take advantage of a limited time offer.

You’d be surprised at how many people will write out extremely thoughtful, detailed responses to a question like that — which you can use to get more prospects to buy.

Email Marketing Plan – Putting it all together

The number one key to skyrocketing your sales is understanding what your audience really wants, and giving it to them. It’s not your email design, your font size, or your button colors.

Those other things are okay to focus on. But their effect almost pales in comparison to communicating the right message to the right customers at the right time.

The best way to do this is understanding what motivates your audience at different stages of their “buyer’s journey”, dividing them up into segments, and then crafting the right message for each one.

Based on the best email marketing strategies mentioned in this article, what’s your email marketing plan going to entail? Let us know in the comments below!

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Raghav Haran

Raghav Haran is a marketer and entrepreneur. After building a successful online business and living a location independent lifestyle, he writes content to help other entrepreneurs do the same. Follow him on Twitter @RaghavHaran

Tim King

Great article! And the bit on mailchimp has solved one of my outstanding tasks I was going to check out (how to mail customers of a certain product with instructions on its use when they purchase)